I told myself that wasn’t going to wait until midnight on the 30th to do finish these posts but… here I am. I have a huge problem with procrastination (as you can tell from the abundance of blog posts) and this assignment did not help that at all. Granted we had all semester to do them and we are being graded on how well we space them out but that didn’t fix my habit.
At first, I wasn’t too worried about the assignment because I had the same type of work assigned to me in high school. We were given prompts and we had to choose from a list of about twenty prompts to answer. So, when Dr. McCoy first told us about these blog posts I thought it would be like my previous experience, I could not have been more wrong. She didn’t give us anything, no prompts, no heads up on what we could or couldn’t write about. She gave us total freedom and that scared me. I thought that needed to know what I had to write to get a good grade.
My first blog post was a disaster, it was cluttered, rushed, and didn’t make much sense. I remember thinking to myself, “she can’t give me a poor grade because there are no guidelines, no help”. I didn’t know what she wanted from me so how would we know how to receive a good grade? She left comments on that first post so, for the next post I followed them with the hope of receiving a better grade. I received a higher grade, but it was still one that was no where close to where I wanted to be. I kept trying and trying but I never knew what to write about. Up until recently, I was very frustrated with myself and the assignment.
I hadn’t realized until my sixth blog post that this assignment helps us as writers to look back on our work and mark the progress that we have made. For me it has been a place to vent, for others they use the blogging space to make sense of what we had just discussed in class or compare something that they had previously experienced. Now that these blog posts have come to a close, I can reflect on the semester that I have had as a writer. I can document my improvement throughout the semester and reaffirm my growth. Although I did not see the purpose of the blog posts at the start of the semester, I now see the benefits and they are very refreshing.